By Hubie and Bertie
The revelations keep coming about how awful today's GOP is. Tonight, members of the January 6 committee read more texts and messages they received in the Mark Meadows document dump as the full House votes on holding Meadows in contempt. What we've seen in the last few days is convincing: The committee knows what it's doing. And they're making serious progress.
But bad as the Republican Party is now, let's take a moment to reflect on just how terrible they've been for — well, decades. The recent death of Bob Dole was a reminder that their perfidy is not just some overnight development. It's been percolating for ages.
When Dole talked about World War II and Korea being "Democrat wars" in his Vice Presidential debate with Senator Walter Mondale in 1976, it was shocking. As it should have been. Never before had a national candidate cast the conflicts that America fought in as partisan exercises. Mondale — also deceased this year, with no fawning events held on Capitol Hill that we saw — expressed outrage in his low-key, Upper Midwest way. Too bad more Democrats who were veterans of "The Big One" and Korea couldn't have spoken out, too.
Daniel Inouye, who lost an arm fighting in Italy (and who was in rehab with Dole), or Charles Rangel, who never shied from a fight, or even George McGovern, who flew multiple hazardous bombing missions over Europe, all had the experience and credibility to rake Dole over the coals. None did, that we know of. The Greatest Generation sure was tight-lipped, weren't they?
If they had, they could have pointed out that it was prominent Republicans who hampered America's response to the gathering clouds of the Second World War. Isolationists like Idaho Senator William Borah, Ohio Senator Robert Taft, and of course, the First Dude of America First, Charles Lindbergh, all helped tie FDR's hands — before the attack on Pearl Harbor freed the United States to enter the war, defend Britain, and fight the Nazis as well as the Japanese.
Long story short, Republicans have rarely been on the right side of things.* Some of them used to be environmentalists or pro-choice, but those folks are all long gone now. The GOP is a menace to America, and we cats HISS.
*Okay, the Civil War. But that's one of the only times.
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